RibLoc System for Surgical Repair of Ribs: Wearable Cognitive Assistant

Unsolicited by us, this video was made by a startup company VIZR Tech to illustrate the potential of wearable cognitive assistance in medical training.

The video provides background to explain relevant concepts to the company's target audience. The company already uses Google Glass (with the camera blocked) in medical training, to show videos of complex medical procedures to trainees.

We created this new Gabriel application to give a tutorial on the RibLoc system for surgical repair of ribs, which is made by AcuteInnovations, Inc. Today, this training is given to a doctor by an AcuteInnovations technician traveling to the doctor's site.

The Gabriel application illustrates how this training could be delivered more efficiently. In addition, the application is available to the doctor to refresh training at any time. The principals of VizrTech appear in this video and share their thoughts about why this is a game-changing innovation.

From a technical point of view, the computer vision in this application is particularly difficult because the parts are small, differ in subtle ways (e.g. color of screw), and easily confused under different lighting conditions. The object detectors are all implemented using deep neural networks.